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Former FCC Boss: Data Caps Not About Network Congestion
An anonymous reader writes "Broadcasting Cable reports on comments from Former FCC chairman Michael Powell (now president of the U.S. cable industry's trade association) confirming what many have long suspected: data caps on internet service aren't just about network congestion, but rather about 'pricing fairness.' 'Asked by MMTC president David Honig to weigh in on data caps, Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said. "Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost." He said bandwidth management was part of it, though a more serious issue with wireless.' Powell went on to say that ISPs had huge up-front costs which had to be allocated out to consumers, and those consumers were familiar with usage-based fees from paying their power bill or buying food. He was part of a panel with three other former FCC chairs. Dick Wiley agreed with his cost argument, adding that the marketplace was responding better than new legislation could. Michael Copps thought the FCC could question data caps a bit more, but wasn't opposed in principle. Reed Hundt said he wants the FCC to focus on getting better, faster, cheaper internet to 100% of the population."
Yeah, sure. All the ISP wants to do is be "fair" to its customers.
When a large company says it's trying to be "fair", you should hold on to your wallet tightly!!
I have Tim Warner cable and have unlimited
Fios is unlimited too
And how much data is it to get past the cap? I stream all my TV. Only have Internet. And I use less than 200gb per month. So far I'm at just over 50 for this month
So they can only blame themselves. I remember back when dial-up was the option, and there were packages with time-limits. But then a few ISPs started offering unlimited time, and as we moved to always-on, they continued to not set limits. 15 years later, they decide limits are what they want, and they're shocked people react negatively?
I have to use wireless because there is no reliable wired service to my house but I'm practically underneath a cell tower. I pay USD$60/month for 5 gigabytes and, if I go over, USD$60 per gigabyte for every gigabyte I go over that. The only way to tell how close I am to the usurious cap is to log into a website that's only updated once a day and which itself serves several megabytes of ads before I can get to the summary of my data usage. Oh, I also get 50%, 75%, and 90% emails and similar SMS messages which I can't receive because my access point is a MIFI which isn't really a phone. I have complained, and of course not only is nothing done the only competitor has EXACTLY the same pricing model. The one time I went over by accident it nearly doubled my bill and when I complained they "generously" gave me a one-time waiver, but when I told them I'd rather have the service slow down or stop working I got nothing but shrugs. Because, of course, it's a profitable trap and nothing else.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
They underprice their services to get users (recurring!), then force users to switch to higher-tier plans when they consume more? This is classic bait-and-switch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
I for one am shocked to hear this! I would never have even suspected that money and profit taking were behind this scheme.
Who would have guessed?
"Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said."
So who were these wrong people who said it was congestion management?
Oh, that's right, THE CABLE COMPANIES THEMSELVES.
And if they want to talk about "fair", then what about the salaries of these executives?
Okay, I don't get it. The companies in question are showing record profits...and what he's saying makes it sound like the capital expenditures necessary to have built out the networks in the first place are on some other set of books that don't come into effect. Isn't it the case that companies usually finance capital expenditures, and then pay off the debt over time? Under those circumstances, if the price of connectivity had to stay high in order to pay off that debt, the level of profitability wouldn't be rising the way it is. His argument sounds like bullshit to me.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
everyone prices stuff like this in the 21st century
90% of your customers pay a fee and you find a way to gouge a small minority willing to pay a premium for that product or service
not much different than getting large fries and drink at a fast food place. they give you a few pennies worth of potatoes and water, the cheapest food products in the USA for $1 or some other huge profit margin price
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some of the providers do have a throttle when going over the cap instead of a price-trap. You have to shop around.
The last time I was researching this, T-mobile had a product similar to the one you describe ( I think it was a 4 GB cap, though), but the terms were that exceeding the cap resulted in throttled service rather than overage fees.
Unfortunately such terms are typically in the fine print...
shouldn't we also have usage-based pricing for the TV they sell us? So that we pay "fairly" for for the fixed cost of establishing the network? Why would that model be different, since it's not really about congestion, as admitted in the article?
The electric bill and buffet examples in the article are terrible: when we pay for electric usage, we actually are paying for utlization/generation; use more and something (coal, natural gas, etc.) actually gets consumed more. And most buffets are all-you-can-eat; if you're paying by weight or something, the analogy is the same — you're actually consuming something. But both bandwidth and TV channels are there no matter how much they're "consumed." Bandwidth can be saturated (the congestion problem) but it can't be actually consumed.
If we're going to talk about "fairness", let's talk about:
It's about being money grubbing assholes. We always knew that.
Now... lets start teaching people to block ads on a massive scale.
You don't want all those ads counting to your bandwidth cap now do you?
Lets see how their tune changes when all the advertisers get on their case.
I have the t-mobile throttling plan on my Tab 10.1 it is horrible. 5GB cap which I usually hit around a week before my turnover. The final week it is throttled to 120k. If the throttling was to half speed or even 1/3 speed it'd be fine. 120k is absurd though.
Bandwidth can't be stockpiled. Any bandwidth not used is lost forever.
So while it's fair to sell priority access but it's not fair to block traffic from empty lines.
That's obstructionist.
Eminent domain exists to seize private assets for the public good.
All natural monopolies should be co-ops.
the phone company here runs DSL off copper at least a generation old and refuses to build-out to serve customers past 3 miles from a CO.. even though it's possible to bring the per-subscriber cost of extending DSL down to as little as $100.. and even though they charge nearly double the 'in town' rate for a fraction of the speed past about 1.5 miles.
the cable company hasn't upgraded anything outside of its headend since they moved into town in the 80s, except for dropping a neighborhood node on each end of town for data. cable internet rates go up at least once per year even though it's a small town with a big fat, underutilized uplink.
each wireless company has exactly one tower here, and when one is down (happens a few times a year) there's not even an agreement between them to carry calls on the other company's tower. towers are well under capacity but data rates go up and caps go down. what was a reasonable $50 for uncapped unthrottled data no longer exists thanks to verizon's buyout of alltel and the fcc for allowing that to happen.
and oh yea.. all four companies receive federal funds to provide service to this rural area....... it just never makes it here.
I don't think it means even that. In fact, I don't think "fair" was ever meant to mean "for you".
From my subjective experience just means "we want more money". The idea is that what they're already getting is so incredibly unfair, when they could be getting more with just a little PR, disinformation and maybe a little collusion. Why, the CEO is probably still driving a Mercedes, while his neighbour is driving a Bugatti Veyron. Can you imagine how unfair that is?
Sarcasm aside... Not that it's necessarily a bad thing or evil. They're expected, and indeed the system is such that they have a legal obligation, to make as much money as possible for the investors. Not fleecing you as hard as physically possible, would be a breach of that obligation. Whether you have some money left after that, is more of a side-effect, than intended. Indeed, it would be a breach of trust if they actually intended to take less money for fairness sake.
I suppose the system just works. Might as well enjoy it. But the corollary is that whenever some large company is talking about something being for your own good in any way, better bring your own lube, they want to shaft you. They're supposed to, after all. Some just are more subtle than others.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is "huge up-front costs" a euphemism for payments to maintain their legal monopoly in most of the neighborhoods that they "server"?
One reason for suspecting this is the recent stories (most recently from a study in Canada that was discussed here on /.) about the actual cost of running an Internet service being less than 1/000 of the money charged the customers. If that's not the explanation of the "huge costs", it must be something else. The obvious guess is the, uh, "campaign contributions" and other related costs of all those zillions of local monopolies that the comms industry has relied on since the development of the telegraph and telephone to prevent any actual competition from arising.
What other sorts of payouts could the phrase "huge up-front costs" refer to? It might be interesting to get a detailed accounting of all this, though I suppose a lot of it would be similarly buried behind a pile of euphemisms.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If it were about congestion, they could simply use QoS with classification by quota to slow you down as you reach higher percentiles of bandwidth consumption.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why do I suspect those who are most in favor of progressive taxation in the interest of fairness are the most up in arms about progressive pricing which, apparently, is in the interest of fairness (bandwidth being a fixed amount).
Fair is fair is who's fair? who cares - it's my fair!
Millenicom has much more generous no-contract plans for $70 on either Verizon or Sprint's network.
This is nothing more than trying to hide the fact that they over sell their network. Like airlines double booking a seat or more classic the 10:1 or even higher ratio of dial-up users to modems in the bank or channels on the PRI.
Tiered pricing is nothing new, no is it anything sinister. When you have some customers deriving vastly more utility from your fixed-cost service those customers are understandably willing to pay more for it. So you charge them more. You'd be a fool not to. Charging every customer the same price means the base price has to go up in order to cover the fixed costs. The base price going up means some customers at the margins (of low use) will simply not bother to pay for your service, i.e. fewer overall customers. You get grandma off dialup by making it artificially inexpensive for her to purchase broadband. You recoup the discount you gave to grandma by charging "guy who streams hundreds of movies every month" more.
My personal preference would be to have broadband companies charge a base price for some reasonable amount of bandwidth that would cover, say, 90% of their users, then charge a per-unit-bandwidth rate for usage over that base threshold. Set the per-unit rate at some reasonable level such that heavy users pay approx. 2x or 3x the base cost as opposed to some astronomically higher price.
Look up Millenicom...69.95 a month no data cap no contract. Used service for 5+ years no problem
I have the t-mobile throttling plan on my Tab 10.1 it is horrible. 5GB cap which I usually hit around a week before my turnover. The final week it is throttled to 120k. If the throttling was to half speed or even 1/3 speed it'd be fine. 120k is absurd though. Replied to wrong post before :(
A complex pricing system would enable someone to get lots of data transfer for a low price, if done at the right time and/or the right place, and maximize equipment utilization. Sounds great!
Before the simple xxx minutes per month pricing system, cell phone customers complained about the complexity of their cell phone bills. Many Americans are stupid. Customer support is expensive. Large numbers of customers are needed to make a cell phone system profitable. Therefore, price systems must be simple. Sorry.
Powell went on to say that ISPs had huge up-front costs which had to be allocated out to consumers, and those consumers were familiar with usage-based fees from paying their power bill or buying food.
In the case of wireless, I couldn't agree more. I negotiate with my local grocery store and set a fixed price for the maximum amount of groceries I might need each month. It works great most of the time, except when unexpected company shows up at the end of the month and I wind up paying an extra $70/egg in overage charges.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Of course this isn't about congestion, if it was other countries with far higher bandwidth allocations wouldn't be charging a fraction of what we charge. Our national broadband is an international embarrassment and is holding back the economy. Hell, even China is starting to deploy Fiber directly to new construction - and - letting you pick your ISP.
Network lines need to be declared a critical infrastructure, turned over to a third party and let consumers truly have a choice of ISP's. There is no competition for broadband in this country outside of a select few areas and the results are overwhelming. If your lucky enough to live in an area with competition you get /much/ better deals.
The free market is a wonderful thing that work around almost any problem. However the free market can't work if competition isn't allowed and monopolies can corner the market. We need another trustbuster like Teddy Roosevelt.
Next election vote for zombie Teddie Roosevelt - dammit.
It's about using tax-payer money to build a network that is cut up into regional mini-monopolies where each monopoly can extract substantial prices for basic network use and even more exhorbitant prices for overages. All of which goes to line executive and shareholder pockets while tax-payer pays the cost of building the infrastructure in the first place. This is called corruption, folks!
Ain't government intervention great?
You really expected something ELSE?
Why?
You can't "bundle" $100,000 worth of "campaign contributions".
Yet the Slashdot herd wants the government to "fix" this? (And impose "gun control" while they mock the failed "War on Drugs", but I digress...)
When the government set it up in the first damn place?
From TFA
QUOTE... for a business that requires "enormously high" fixed costs -- digging up the streets, put the wires in -- and operational expense, "it is a completely rational and acceptable process to figure out how to fairly allocate those costs among your consumers who are choosing the service and will pay you to recover those costs.UNQUOTE
To me -- "digging up the streets, put the wires in" - are start-up costs. And I would be willing to agree that they are "enormously high" However; operational expenses plus depreciation, insurance, etc. are recurring or "fixed" costs. My understanding is that operational "fixed" costs are very much, lower.
I have no problem with conspicuous consumers of bandwidth paying more. My problem is with costs not dropping for all consumers!
If you can't figure out why or what's going on - then it's all just about the money.
because that way they can get money out of the customers.
what did you think fair meant? it just means billing as much as they can. which kind of sucks since they aren't doing the right thing and getting as many customers on as many devices as they can..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why is it absurd? You got what you paid for, would you rather get billed like GP by the GB when going over? Or completely dropped from the net?
While I agree data cap sucks, fact is, you have a contract with them, like it or not, those are the terms.
Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said. "Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost."
----
Mr. Powell is straw-manning here. The only ones who have ever even suggested that data caps were about congestion management were ISP industry shills (usually company spokesman and industry paid commentators). Every other reasonable person (including the customer base) has guessed from the get go that the caps were pure cash grabs.
While I appreciate that Mr. Powell is finally coming clean, this candor now way after the fact merely slightly elevates his status from "pure whore" to "occationally honest whore".
The US should have been building the fiber lines based around a munipal/county model much the way most water/sewer systems work where the city/county government installs and maintains the lines and then leases out that line to whatever ISP the customer wants. Then we would have been allowed actual competition. Charter offers you the best package, fine you sign up for Charter for $X per month and they pay the city/county $y per month to lease the line. Want Mom&Pop ISP that charges $Z per month, great, they still pay the city/county $y per month to lease the line.
That is something at the local level I would have voted a bond issue, sales tax increase, or property tax increase for without a problem.
Instead we have the system we have now...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
To also be fair.... former FCC chairman Michael Powell (now president of the U.S. cable industry's trade association) confirmed as well his large payout was exactly where they said it would be when he walked into the president of the U.S. cable industry's trade association job.
Like the BILLIONS some of these providers were paid BY THE GOVERNMENT and WITH OUR TAX MONEY for the development of broadband?
You know, all that money they frittered away?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
get t-mobile there 70$ no cap prepaid plain has gone live. enjoy it wile it last.
[ Charged for caps on home wireless internet & no easy way to determine usage & would prefer throttling ]
How much of your own effort do you want to put into it? It's easy to put your own cheap off the shelf router just before the ISP's device and flash it with your own firmware. Look at OpenWRT or one of the other FOSS or commercial firmware router projects. Probably pretty common among /.ers. Since they provide statistics via SNMP, a (free) off-router network monitoring package could provide all sorts of usage graphs. Admittedly, many of these only show past day/week/30 days and not usage since the first of the month. There are a raft of reasons why it's a good idea to deploy one of these, including improved security. Using bandwidth monitoring and iptables to do custom throttling would be feasible, but you might have to build it.
Did they lower the base price accordingly when adding caps? Didn't think so.
US citizens have a collective power to take real estate, easements, and capital - as long as that taking is a forced sale for public use at a legally-determined "just" price. This power has been exercised through the states since before the federal Constitution was ratified. In fact, it's usually not possible to build electrical transmission lines, roads, and telco networks without using eminent domain. Telcos and public utilities thus have a constitutional obligation to facilitate public use - and if they don't do a good job, we the people can and should take their easements back - and take their wires while we're at it. Right now we're paying world-class profits for less than world-class service. If the telcos ask, "Well what are you going to do about it?" like schoolyard bullies we should remind them that their entire business is based on property rights that are not absolute.
Go to SEC and read the latest 10Q/10K for your company. ( URL: http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml ) My ISP (Cablevision) has $10 B in debt, negative equity and last year made about 3% on the total assets after covering operations, depreciation and interest due. They reduced their debt and pay an 'ok' dividend which is why they are attractive to investors. So I feel pretty good about paying $70 @ month for a cable/internet connection with basic 'TV' and about 20Mbps download / 2Mbps up. I guess the government could have done it and just paid for it with taxes, but it would have probably been for 128Kbps ('who needs more?'), have cost 3-5x as much and taken 7 years longer. As to FCC, maybe they should look at the electric bill... my bill breaks delivery away from supply...and I can get 'supply' competitively. That leaves the 'delivery' (infrastructure) to be assessed separately by folks who (hopefully) understand capitalization, recapture rates, sinking funds, etc. Maybe the real question we should be asking is: Why should cable industry keep the 'utility' part combined with the 'content' part?
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
"now president of the U.S. cable industry's trade association"
Maybe now you deadheads can understand his actions as head
of the FCC, a job he was sooo highly qualified to hold.
Wake up folks! The cable companies bought and own this guy.
I have the t-mobile throttling plan on my Tab 10.1 it is horrible. 5GB cap which I usually hit around a week before my turnover.
Do you use Wi-Fi everywhere you can? What bandwidth-intensive actions do you usually do away from Wi-Fi, and in what specific locations away from Wi-Fi do you do them?
If the throttling was to half speed or even 1/3 speed it'd be fine. 120k is absurd though.
What that means is you're falling back to EDGE.
It's easy to put your own cheap off the shelf router just before the ISP's device and flash it with your own firmware.
How so? A lot of these MiFi and similar devices have no Ethernet port to which one could connect an off-the-shelf router. Instead, users are expected to connect through Wi-Fi.
It's also about protecting cable TV and the DVD/Blu-Ray movie market. Many ISPs are also media and cable TV companies as well.
A lot of people are dropping cable TV and/or reducing/eliminating buying movies on disc in favor of getting their entertainment all from the 'net.
This is a trend they want to mitigate for obvious reasons.
The FCC underwent "regulatory capture" decades ago. Don't expect any help from the government unless they find themselves under a lot of public heat, threatening re-elections/campaign contributions.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
In that case, Comcast paid for the infrastructure when it bought @Home and assumed its debt.
[link to paywalled WSJ article]
Could you cite another source that won't charge me $21.99?
If you believe that ISPs are cheating their customers, then start a competing ISP. Lay your own fiber, license spectrum, peer upstream. You are allowed to do all of these.
After you add up all the numbers, you'll realize that it *really is* expensive to sell internet access.
of course its bullshit the cost per gb these days is so cheap it would take terabytes of data to start hurting there pockets. they also proved this fact with cell phone company's when they claimed there bandwidth was expensive.
How so? The more customers you want to serve at a given level with a given amount of spectrum, the more towers you need to put up. It costs money to put up towers, and this last-mile cost dwarfs the cost of backhaul transit.
Under fee for bandwidth, you get charged the same for packets you send or receive when the network is not congested (the zero dark hundred hours, midnight to 5 AM) as for packets you send or receive when the network is congested. Paying for priority would more closely resemble the packages that satellite ISPs like Exede offer: 10 GB per month with unmetered late nights.
They did lower the real price by not raising the nominal price when the currency inflated.
Why are you surprised?
There are a couple fundamental issues with capitalism that are failing to be addressed here: monopolies, and natural monopolies.
Capitalism really is less about competition and more about accumulation of capital. The competitive behavior is the goal, but it comes with the built-in problem of monopolies. You can't allow people to 'win' this particular game. Taken to an extreme, you might end up with one company that simply owned everything.
Capitalism in this sense is kind of a bait-and-switch. We're sold on the idea of an efficient competitive marketplace, but end up with monopolies and rent-seeking.
The problem of natural monopolies is even worse. Your ability to start a competing business is almost entirely a function of how much initial capital it takes to enter said market. It's far easier to start a restaurant or web company than to start a company that lays undersea fiber optic cable. This is why people talk about 'barriers to entry' as a bad thing: they reduce the efficiency of the market. Further, there are some services where competition would have negative utility -- no one really needs multiple companies laying water, power, or sewage lines to their home.
The answer to both of these problems is government. The government's purpose is to prevent or eliminate these market failures.
With natural monopolies, there is no real purpose behind allowing them to make a profit. It's a form of taxation, and can justly be called a theft from the public. These markets are the natural purview of government.
We have a slightly larger toolbox for dealing with large companies. We can break them up entirely, levy progressive business taxes, or subsidize potential competitors.
We need to start divorcing the idea of competition from the idea of capitalism: they're not synonymous. Yes, I am anti-capitalist -- but very pro-competition. Which side are you on?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Whatever their reasons, the biggest wrong is the failure to disclose up front the caps, instead marketing the service as "10Mbps" or whatever, period. Here's where the FTC should be involved, requiring every ad that makes any claims about their service to state all the limitations, and not in the manner we're accustomed to hearing from pharmaceutical and financial "service" ads, which sound like John Moschitta (FedEx ad fast talker) at the end. If being regulated by the FCC precludes such a regulation by the FTC (I think it does not), then that's what the FCC should be doing. People who argue for less regulation may or may not have a point in some cases, but really never have a decent argument against disclosure of terms of sale/service in advertising.
That is what we would have had among ISPs, pushing reliability / bandwidth / neutrality / features up, and the price down. Instead you went the semi-socialist route with cable / phone company monopolies and government interventionism. The results are exactly as we libertarians predicted...
--libman
at part pennies a gb cost reselling it as a service for 1-2$ is fair?
FUCK THEM
i have an unlimited service and ill never want anything less.
PERIOD
My theory:
They do it for consistent income which allows them to more reliably forecast future revenues. If a customer expects to consume at a certain level every month it is better for the company to set that customer's monthly rate at that level. The penalties for using more than the customer said they would, have to be high enough to prevent the customer from picking a lower tier and paying for an overage two out of every three months. The overage penalty in your case seems a bit high though. They are much more reasonable in my area.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Is the former FCC boss a network engineer for one or more of the carriers? If not, I don't see how she/he could make that kind of claim.
If you ignore congestion (which he is arguing that this is not about), then eating bandwidth doesn't cost the ISP significantly more. There's no real incrimental cost difference between a pipe being 10% full and 20% full. Bandwidth caps, so far, have mostly been about directing customers to services that make the ISP more money -- "Skype bandwidth will cost you, but using my home phone service will be a lot chaper".
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I think it's the same with bandwidth.
Back as far as the mid '80s people had long been complaining that the 'net was about to collapse under it's own weight as data usage was ever ramping up. -- but, somehow, bandwidth technology seemed to magically always keep just ahead of the usage curve. ... but if you look at it the other way round -- that bandwidth consumption is always going to expand to fit bandwidth availability ... that as long as the 'net is "fast enough", people will start doing things that consume the available space -- the magic suddenly disappears. I'm not going to stream netflix movies unless my data connection is fast enough .. I'll just rip my DVD's to a 16GB SD card, and watch movies that way on the way to work. I'lll only do those things if the bandwidth is fast enough, and not disturbingly expensive for my budget.
Netflix wouldn't have survived 15 years ago when the last mile for 99% of the public was a 33Kilobit/second modem, and downloading a 50 megabyte short film took about 4 hours. That's the main reason why it didn't exist back then.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Many ISPs are also media and cable TV companies as well.
Many ISP's are not media companies.
I can only think of 2, those being Comcast and Time Warner.
If big media actually had a meaningful portion of the ISP share, then your ISP would be playing copyright cop instead of how it currently is.
"His name was James Damore."
Remember long distance phone bills ? ......
Now nation wide free calling with all cellular common ?
I remember how we challenged them on how they qualified long distance charges....by how fast the copper wears out ???
So does this mean sometime soon in the near future there will be no data caps because the initial investment has been paid off ?
Just keep talking
God they think we are all eternally stupid.....
Because the performance on the throttled speed is incredibly poor as to make it useless. In hindsight, I would have gone with AT&T who charge $10/extra gb. T-mobile also offers unlimited data to phones, but not tablets. Separating tablet and phone plans is collusion between the big three as functionally my tab is just a bigger cell phone (and with the European rom could even make calls).
The common ground/interests aren't necessarily always copyright-related, but also "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", where enemy==customers.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
At work, which is driving around all the day
Then your employer might be able to afford the 10 GB plan, or if you're self-employed, you could try buying music to store locally rather than relying on Pandora streaming. What bitrate do you use on Pandora, and how long do you keep it open each day?
Sure, I can give you a link or two. Far from me to discourage a healthy dose of skepticism :p
http://definitions.uslegal.com/b/breach-of-fiduciary-duty/
"When one person does agree to act for another in a fiduciary relationship, the law forbids the fiduciary from acting in any manner adverse or contrary to the interests of the client, or from acting for his own benefit in relation to the subject matter."
So, yes, if you just decided to just give this year's profits to charity and it's not obvious what that does for your investors, you might just get sued.
Also, for an actual law, you can check out stuff like Fiduciary Obligations Act
Note that as per section 1, ""Fiduciary" includes a trustee under any trust, expressed, implied, resulting or constructive executor, administrator, guardian, conservator, curator, receiver, trustee in bankruptcy, assignee for the benefit of creditors, partner, agent, officer of a corporation, public or private, public officer, or any other person acting in a fiduciary capacity for any person, trust or estate." My emphasis.
So, yeah, if you thought being a CEO meant free hand to do whatever you wish with other people's money, think again.
That said, note that there is leeway in exactly what is the best for the principal, i.e., best for the person whose money you're entrusted with. Nobody is forbidding you, for example, from whitewashing the company image with ads, PR or, yes, by playing the charity card, if you can make a case that you expected more profits as a result of it. There's a lot of 'oh, we care so much' act that basically is ok if you can make a case that a corporate asshole image would hurt your clients' interests more.
That said, also note that most of the big charity is actually private. A guy like Bill Gates is perfectly within his rights to spend his own money however he sees fit. Basically if you decide to just give 20 million of the company's money to charity, you might get sued, but if you can pull a 20 million salary as a CEO (and God knows some people got paid even more even to drive a company into the ground) and then give that money to charity, well, nobody can tell you what to do with your own money.
Also note that the rules are a bit different from non-profit organizations. Those are by definition not supposed to make a profit for anyone. So if an organization is registered as a charity, well, it's safe to say it won't be sued for actually spending its money on charity.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Many ISP's are not media companies. I can only think of 2, those being Comcast and Time Warner.
Time Warner and Time Warner Cable claim to be separate companies.
Perhaps if you let me get my bandwidth from another country.
Because American companies are nothing but greedy thief's.
And the government condones such behavior.
Gee. Wonder if the possibility of that position guided his regulatory efforts.
Sounds like the very definition of regulatory capture.
Except that the nominal cost of delivering a given amount of bits/second is dropping signficantly every year.
True, the marginal cost per bit per second is dropping. But the cost of providing the first bit per second, which involves customer service calls and the labor and fuel cost of rolling a truck as needed, isn't dropping. That's why for example the wireless carrier Ting charges per line even before any minutes are added to the plan.
1) The check is not in the mail
2) They didn't give at the office.
3) He will come in your mouth.
3a) (nor will he still respect you in the morning. He doesn't respect you NOW)
4) The man from the government is not there to help you
5) The dog HAS bitten people before
"We need the data caps to rape our customers even more than we do now, to make record megaprofits."
When the is no competition, there are no fair prices to consumers, there is only price gouging. Cable tv/Internet providers in the U.S. have done everything possible to gouge their customers all that they can. Data caps are just another means to price gouge their customers even harder.
I think of government granted monopolies must exist for simplicity of connection & rights of way
electricity, water, cable televison, internet connectivity-
I like that I can choose an electricity supplier, if not connection... I can choose my long distance phone service readily.
but if my electrical utility announced that they were going to be buying a sports team? how well do you think that would go over?
I say, take the internet/comcast away from the FCC- and and put them entirely under PUC on a state by state basis.... where every rate must be agonized over... this and every service granted a near-ass monopoly with rights of way throughout the communities served..
yea- exclude satellite services, they don't have government mandated cables stringing down my yard... comcast does...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
...chose a poor way to go about it. Selling it to me service as 'Unlimited', then charging me an exorbitant rate for exceeding some level they never warned me about is garbage. They should have been up front and told me I would pay 'X' dollars for the fist 'Y' amount, then so much per GB after that. This deal of suckering me in with promises of 'Unlimited', then turning me off, or restricting me, or sending me an exorbitant 'overage' charge at the end of the month I had no way to prepare for is out of line.
I'm betting they could even program their system to email me a periodic report so I'd know where I stand.
It's really not possible to track it my end because they also charge for what they attempt to send, but I never received. Learned this lesson the hard way, on my cell phone...
So you are saying they hid the throttling from you? Or where you just too dumb to not read the actual terms of the contract?
Be glad you aren't on a Danish network with throttling, we get 1 KB/s, but those are the terms, don't hear people around here crying about it when they get hit by the contract.
In America, when customers are unhappy with their product, we are free to bitch and complain about it. Companies tend to prefer this over us simply quietly switching to another service when our contract is up without telling them why they are losing their money.
I had DSL till last October, when I got disconnected for too much downloading.
I was paying $65 a month for my crappy 5mbs DSL.
I paid $10 for a USENET account. Via that account I did most my downloading, probably 80% of all my downloading.
How come the USENET server can charge me $10 a month and still make a profit, when the DSL companies charges $65 a month and cuts me off because I am downloading too much? It's obvious that what I download costs less then $10 a month, otherwise the USENET server could not keep in business.
ISP are full of bullshit and it needs to stop.
What we need is real accounting of what it costs per MB.
Be seeing you...
You can get faster pipes by changing the signalling. It can even be done in software.
And there's a fixed rate you pay for "infrastructure costs", right?
What are the companies doing if they aren't fixing/upgrading their product? Why should they make ANY money if all they are doing is letting the hardware sit there and do its work? Once bought, the hardware costs electricity and bugger all else.
So if they AREN'T upgrading the infrastruture, there's no need to keep paying.
"Reed Hundt said he wants the FCC to focus on getting better, faster, cheaper internet to 100% of the population."
All of the above is absolutely useless if it is crippled by capricious and artificially low data caps.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
FCC to focus on getting better, faster, cheaper internet to 100% of the population
that's called FASCISM !!!
The FCC who creep-ed into the internet, while mangling the management of power and frequency of the public Spectrum with FASCISM.
(corp owned public spectrum)
The FCC is another agency which has BROKEN the PUBLIC TRUST!
Using some worst case / high profit scenarios.. It's not overly technical..
Here's a fascinating article where the true costs of bandwidth are calculated by yielding very high profits (300%) with a worst case scenario where all customers want to watch 3 hi-def shows / customer (3 people in the same house) streamed simultaneously.. The costs are still very low.. I really do urge you all to read this article written in 2011.. It really puts things in perspective and shows just how greedy these corporations are...
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/04/07/what-does-a-gigabyte-of-internet-service-really-cost-a-look-at-the-worst-case-scenario/
Yes, because customers who behave like asshats and make fools of themselves make the corporations listen...
And in Denmark, when you switch provider, they will often contact you and ask you why, so I think I prefer our version.
The NSA simply can't snoop on everything /store for processing if they allow the speeds and availability to go up too fast. Hence the lugubrious rollout of FiOS and anything increasing bandwidths too quickly.
I don't know if you are in the US but Hughes-net satellite service is about that price and has higher caps. Wild blue has higher caps but with a 30 day rolling average if you go over it takes two weeks of super slow service to get back under the cap. I use Networx download monitor software. It's available at CNET.com and can give you an hour by hour usage log. If you, or a friend, are technically adept you can flash DD-WRT on your router (if it's compatible) and closely monitor all internet usage.